Open House Time Lapse Video

A fun little video from our School Open House kicking off Catholic Schools weeks.

Time Flies

4 hours captured in 21 seconds.

The Lord's Prayer - 2017 Catholic Schools Week Video Production

In celebration of Catholic Schools Week, I have my Middle School students work with Movie Maker and create a video.  This year, we choose to record The Lord's Prayer.  Each student will create, produce/edit their own version and learn to process into a final copy for publication.  I enjoy working with these students on this kind of project as we have great discussions and the creative process is put into their hands.

5/6th Grade

7/8th Grade

January brings pajamas and new classes.

So fun to start the new year in Tech Ed with a great group of fun kids.  Many projects are planned for the 9-weeks, but the quarter goes way too fast.

The Big Presidential Election

Students in 5/6th and 7/8th learned about Excel spreadsheets during this election.  The lesson involved understanding the Electoral College vote and gathering prediction information.  This lesson was quite engaging and students were excited to calculate their predictions.

Explosion of Engineering and Programming . . .

This moment captured represents the explosion of thinking that has been occurring in my 7/8th Grade Robotics Elective.  Students are challenged, using my Green City Challenge project, several different missions to complete.  They have to design, build and then program their robot to complete several missions such as sorting rubbish, attach a solar panel to the house, close the dam, activate the factory clean-air smokestack.  I have been very impressed with this group of middle school students.  

Click to watch a great example of some of the programming . . .

Computer Lab Window View

Fortunate for me, when I need to stretch my eye muscles from concentrating on the computer screen, or between classes to get a glance outside, my view is of our school prayer garden.

Each little glance is a prayer in itself.

Welcome to the New Year . . .

It's time to get busy in the lab and catch all the learning we can. 

 2016 -17 school year will continue to inspire us to create and learn as much as we can in the computer lab.  From Keyboarding to Coding, Word Processing to Robotics - this year will be GREAT!!!

Coding to Keyboarding Summer Computer Activities . . .

Review your touch-typing finger placement, visit the Dance Mat levels, sing and type your ABC, pop some keyboard popcorn and then do some cool computer programming in Code.org. 

Have a wonderful summer and improve your touch-typing and programming skills. 

I will see you in August!!!

             

              

Last Week Selfie - Digital Citizenship/Smartphone Lesson

 Did you know when your finger swipes your touch screen phone, an electric charge transfers to your finger?  
Did you know that your touch screen is built to take 225 Million touches?

My Advanced 5th/6th Tech Ed class just learned all about their touch screen.  In the process, we discussed their digital responsibility to handle having all their technology at their fingertips, but know how to get their responsibilities accomplished.  It can be hard for adults, yet students are entering a world where they have all the digital technology sucking them into distractions taking them away from their student responsibilities.  What a great discussion to identify the problem and address solutions.  

Students were allowed to bring their own devices and complete my lesson while having their personal distractions at their fingertips. We only lost one student to digital distraction.  But like the Good Shepard, we will work hard to find the lost sheep and bring him back to the fold.